Bush Co: Taking A Less Bold Approach To Honesty

[Originally published 10/16 on my old LiveJournal blog]

[Warning: The following post could be called what is known as a 'rant'. Those with heart conditions, pregnancy, muscular disorders, or aversions to the speaking of truth in the face of overwhelming propaganda should not ride. Cost: Four tickets.]

Since 2003, whenever anyone tried to insinuate that the war in Iraq was based on the Project For A New American Century (PNAC) neoconservative agenda, and not the imminent Iraqi threat it was sold as, Bush loyalists have always gotten angry and called these people conspiracy theorists and tried to set them straight. This wasn't a war of choice, they insisted! This was about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's Al Qeada links, they cried! This wasn't about rebuilding the Middle East, they stated! It became a tougher argument to push, as the facts continued to pour in.

Well, bad news... No less than our own Secretary of State, Ms. Condoleeza "I believe the title was 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States'" Rice has come out and admitted what many knew all along- that the Iraq project was simply about building "a different kind of Middle East". Nope that doesn't sound like the PNAC agenda at all.

Crooks and Liars has video from NBC's Meet the Press:
Condi Rice: Verifies what we all Thought

Read it and (hopefully) weep. From the transcript:
"But the fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al-Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al-Qaeda and perhaps after the Taliban and then our work would be done and we would try to defend ourselves.

Or we could take a bolder approach, which was to say that we had to go after the root causes of the kind of terrorism that was produced there, and that meant a different kind of Middle East."

This just blows every part of my mind capable of rational thought. More than any other statement yet by an administration official, this one completely blows the original reasons for the war to pieces. Change the war rationalization a million times over (and they just about have), but that doesn't erase the history of how the war was sold: WMDs, Saddam the terrorist supporter, and the imminent nuclear destruction of America. This was sold as war of last resort- a war that up until the last minute, the President was trying to avoid. Well if now you're stating it was, from the beginning, about looking beyond Al Qeada and taking a "bolder approach", then every single thing administration officials said in the buildup to war in 2002 and 2003 is, unequivocally, a LIE. With a capital, bolded "L". It was either about a planned rebuilding of the Middle East or it was a preemptive response to an imminent attack. It can't be both. Many people knew all along which one it really was and now we can thank Ms. Rice for her candor in ending the debate.

I wonder if they get NBC in Iraq. I'm sure some of our troops would love to be better informed of why they are there. They want the truth? They can't handle the truth.


Some relevant quotes for historical reference:
"And, again, I don't know where he is. I, I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."
-President Bush about Osama in press conference, March 13, 2002

"I hope this Iraq situation will be resolved peacefully... I want to remind people that, Saddam Hussein, the choice is his to make as to whether or not the Iraqi situation is resolved peacefully. You said we're headed to war in Iraq -I don't know why you say that. I hope we're not headed to war in Iraq. I'm the person who gets to decide, not you."
-President Bush to reporters, December 31, 2002

"Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out."
–President Bush to three U.S. Senators in March 2002, a full year before the Iraq invasion

"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
–National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, on Iraq's nuclear capabilities and the Bush administration's case for war, Sept. 8, 2002

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason."
-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, "Vanity Fair" interview, May 28, 2003

And that's the facts, Jack.